His Rejected Luna Returned as a Queen

The Mark In The Trees

Chapter Six: The Mark in the Trees

Elena did not move.

The pendant lay cold inside her closed fist, though the warmth she'd felt a moment earlier still lingered faintly beneath her skin.

Maya stood on the far side of the stream, staring at her. "You saw something."

"No."

"Elena."

"I said no."

"Your hand was glowing."

"It wasn't glowing."

"It was doing something."

Elena opened her fingers slowly. The pendant looked ordinary now—old metal, tarnished at the edges, small enough to vanish inside a closed fist. The crescent moon and three thin lines were still carved into its face, but there was no light coming from it now. No warmth. Nothing to prove anything had happened at all.

Maya crossed the stream carefully, stone to stone, until she stood at Elena's side. "Can I see it?"

Elena hesitated, and she wasn't sure why. The pendant belonged to no one she knew. She'd found it under a rock in a forest she'd never set foot in before today. There was no reason to feel protective of it.

And yet when Maya reached for it, Elena's fingers closed around it before she'd decided to move them.

Maya stopped. "Okay. That's new."

"What?"

"You just acted like I was trying to steal it."

"I didn't."

"You absolutely did."

Elena opened her hand again, the pendant still sitting there, unremarkable. "I'm sorry."

Maya's expression softened. "You don't have to apologize. Something strange is happening. We're both a little on edge."

"A little?"

"Fine. Extremely on edge."

Despite herself, Elena smiled, though it faded the moment she looked back at the tree. The symbol carved into the bark looked older than the settlement, older than the road they'd walked that morning—the lines deep, their edges softened by years of rain and wind. Someone had put it there deliberately. Someone had meant for it to last.

She stepped closer.

"Wait," Maya said.

"What?"

"Maybe don't touch it."

"Why?"

"Because every time you touch something mysterious, something strange happens to you."

"That's happened once."

"Today."

Elena gave her a look. Maya crossed her arms and said nothing further, and Elena turned back to the trunk. The symbol sat at chest height, and around it, nearly lost in the weathered bark, were smaller marks that didn't look like accidental damage. They looked like letters.

"Do you see anything?" Maya asked.

"Maybe."

"What?"

"I can't read it."

Maya came to stand beside her, and together they studied the marks, Elena tracing one line with her eyes, trying to make sense of a shape that refused to resolve into anything familiar.

The pendant pulsed.

Elena inhaled sharply and Maya stepped back on instinct.

"What happened?"

Elena didn't answer right away. The pendant had gone warm in her palm—not painfully, not yet—and the warmth was moving, tracing up from her hand toward her wrist along the line of her veins. She dropped it without meaning to. Maya caught it before it hit the ground.

"Elena?"

Elena pressed a hand to her own wrist, and the silver light returned. This time she knew she wasn't imagining it. A thin line traced itself beneath her skin, faint as moonlight on water, curling once around her wrist before it vanished as quickly as it had come.

Maya stared. Elena stared back. For a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"I think you should have kept this a secret," Maya finally said, looking down at the pendant in her own hand.

Elena let out a breath that almost became a laugh. "That's your reaction?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. Maybe panic."

"I am panicking."

"You don't look like you're panicking."

"I have years of practice."

That startled a real laugh out of Elena—short, surprised, gone almost as soon as it came, because a howl rose somewhere in the distance and both of them went still.

North. Too close.

"We need to move," Maya said.

Elena took the pendant back and tucked it beneath her collar against her skin. They left the stream behind and continued east, and for the first hour neither of them mentioned it again. Elena kept expecting the warmth to return. It didn't, which somehow left her more unsettled than if it had.

The forest changed as they walked—trees thickening, roots twisting across the ground like dark fingers reaching for the path. The mountains ahead no longer looked distant. They looked like they were waiting.

Elena kept turning the stranger's words over in her mind. *Go east. There's a place beyond the mountains. Somewhere you might find answers.* She didn't trust him. She reminded herself of that with some regularity—a man who appeared without warning, followed them through unfamiliar forests, seemed to know exactly what was hunting them, and refused to give his name was not a man anyone should trust.

And yet they were walking precisely where he'd told them to go.

"I hate this," Maya said eventually.

"Which part?"

"Everything."

"That's fair."

"We're following directions from a man we don't even know."

"We're not following him."

"He said east. We're going east."

"Coincidence."

Maya gave her a flat look, and Elena sighed. "Fine."

"You don't trust him either."

"No."

"Then why are we doing this?"

Elena didn't have an answer. Every road behind them led back toward Blackwood territory, toward Adrian, toward a life that no longer wanted her in it. Someone had known his voice well enough to use it against her. Riders had followed them across a border most people never crossed. And now a symbol carved into an ancient tree had answered something inside her that she hadn't known was still asking questions.

"I don't know," she admitted quietly.

Maya's expression softened. "We'll figure it out."

"That's what you always say."

"Because eventually it's true."

They kept walking.

By midday, they'd crossed into a stretch of forest so dense the light barely reached the ground, and Maya's steps had slowed with hunger she wasn't complaining about, which worried Elena more than complaining would have.

"We should have thought further ahead than 'leave before sunrise,'" Maya said eventually, breaking a silence that had gone on too long.

"I know."

"I'm not blaming you."

"I know that too."

"I'm just saying it out loud so it stops living in my head alone."

Elena managed a small smile. "Understood."

They stopped near a cluster of berry bushes Maya recognized from childhood foraging lessons, and while they ate what little they could safely gather, Elena found herself watching the treeline without meaning to, the pendant a small, warm weight against her skin that hadn't cooled entirely even now.

It was Maya who noticed first. She went very still, a berry halfway to her mouth. "Elena."

"What?"

"Don't move."

Elena froze. Through the trees, perhaps thirty feet off, a wolf stood watching them—not one of the riders' mounts, not anything wearing a cloak or carrying a weapon. A wolf, fully shifted, russet-colored, its eyes fixed on Elena with an intensity that made her skin prickle.

It didn't growl. It didn't advance. It simply watched, the way the stranger had watched her outside the cabin days ago—recognition, or something close to it, in an animal's gaze that shouldn't have been capable of holding either.

"Is that someone's wolf?" Maya breathed.

"I don't know."

"It's not attacking."

"I know."

"That's either good or very, very bad."

The wolf held Elena's gaze a moment longer. Then, without any sound at all, it turned and disappeared into the undergrowth, and the forest settled back into its ordinary quiet as if nothing had happened.

Elena let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

"What was that?" Maya asked.

"I don't know."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

They didn't linger. They packed up what remained of the berries and pushed on, the mountains growing larger with every hour, and it was nearly dusk when the stranger appeared again—not stepping from behind a tree this time, but simply there, ahead of them on the narrow deer trail they'd been following, as if he'd been waiting.

Maya jumped. "You have got to stop doing that."

"You're going the wrong way," he said, ignoring her entirely, eyes on Elena.

"We're going east."

"East, yes. Not this far north."

Elena's jaw tightened. "You could have told us that before we walked an hour in the wrong direction."

"I didn't know you'd chosen this path until I found you on it."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be." He glanced past her, toward the way they'd come, something flickering across his face too fast to name. "Did something follow you through here?"

Elena hesitated. "A wolf. It didn't attack."

His expression sharpened. "What did it look like?"

"Russet. Large."

Something shifted behind his eyes—not fear exactly, but a kind of careful, contained alarm he was working to keep off his face. "You should have told me that immediately."

"We just met you again five seconds ago."

"Fair."

"Who was it?"

"I don't know," he said, and for once she believed the honesty of it, if not the completeness. "But if it's who I think it might be, you need to move faster than you have been."

"You keep saying things like that and never finishing them."

"I know."

"It's infuriating."

"I've been told."

Despite everything, Maya let out a short, disbelieving laugh. "Are you two going to do this every single time?"

Neither of them answered her. The stranger's attention had already moved past Elena's shoulder, toward the darkening trees behind them, his whole body gone still in the way she'd learned meant danger by now.

"What is it?" she asked, low.

"Riders. Not close yet. But moving faster than before."

"How do you know?"

"Because they've stopped trying to be quiet." His eyes came back to hers, urgent now. "There's a ridge half a mile ahead. Rock cover, a place to disappear for the night if we reach it before dark. After that, I can't promise anything."

"We," Maya repeated. "So you're coming with us now?"

"For tonight."

"Why the change of heart?" Elena asked.

His jaw tightened, and for a moment something raw showed through the careful blankness he usually wore. "Because that wolf shouldn't have found you this far south. And if it did, it means they're closer than I thought."

"Closer than who?"

He didn't answer. He turned and started walking, faster now, and after a beat of hesitation, Elena and Maya followed, boots slipping on the uneven ground as the last of the daylight bled out of the sky above the canopy.

They reached the ridge just as full dark fell—a shallow overhang of stone, barely enough to keep three people out of sight, and the stranger pressed them both back against the rock with a hand that didn't quite touch either of them.

"Quiet now," he murmured. "No matter what you hear."

Elena's heart hammered against her ribs. Somewhere below them, in the dark, branches began to move—not with the careless rhythm of animals, but with the deliberate, searching quiet of something that knew exactly what it was looking for and had simply not found it yet.

And then, close enough that Elena felt the sound in her chest before she heard it clearly, a voice drifted up through the trees—low, familiar, carrying easily on the still night air.

"She's close. I can feel her."

Elena went cold.

It wasn't the scarred rider's voice.

It was Adrian's.